Title: Anticlimactic
Word Count: 375
Rating: K+
Characters/pairings: Sally and Percy
Summary: Sally's fears come to fruition, and she can't do anything but wait. AU.
Author's Notes: Wow, this is old. I posted it on Livejournal around last…July? But it never made it here. Here it is now. :)
"I need a moment," she says, and he can't deny her that.
"Absolutely, ma'am," the young doctor says, offering a rueful half-smile and his utmost sympathies. He runs a hair through his sandy blonde hair, lingering for a moment, as if to say, "I'm new at this, but I wish I could help more," and then turns abruptly, leaving Sally at her broken son's side.
She watches the door swing shut behind him and sinks into a chair, then covers her eyes and sighs. Her only son's body lies limp in front of her, but right now? She isn't ready to face the unnaturally bent legs or gouged chest a second time.
Trampled. By a hellhound. Sally isn't one to swear, but at that moment, she's mentally cursing up a store. Cursing the hellhound. Cursing Poseidon for not doing something, anything for their son. Cursing herself for being so helpless. And cursing the Fates, because of all the fights, of all the great and terrible monsters that could've hurt her son, a lowly hellhound had finally done the damage.
She tastes salt, but she can't tell if she's drawn blood by biting her lip too hard or if one of the countless tears she's cried since she got the call had found its way through her chattering teeth.
It doesn't matter—what does, now that her son could be on the verge of death? They don't call it the emergency room for nothing. Percy—Perseus Jackson is the core of her being, her reason to exist. She loves taking care of him, being there for him.
She doesn't want to be alone again.
Time passes. She's not sure how much, but the doctor has returned twice to adjust some level of something or other, and her son's expression has changed from calm to pained to calm again, and Paul just arrived with Annabeth, but his eyes never open, so she doesn't bother to check the time. He stirs once, grimacing and groaning, and Annabeth moves to the corner, where she sits with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, and Paul fidgets endlessly, but Sally never moves.
Is this it? Is this the end of his ability to make her feel like she has a purpose, his ability to make everyone around him feel valued? Could this be all the Fates had allotted her boy, fifteen years? Really, she never swears, but this is pretty damn anticlimactic, if you ask her.
Pretty damn anticlimactic.
- fin